


To Those Who Wait

by amillionmistakes



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Adoption, Eleven rambling pages, Future Fic, M/M, Mentions of failed surrogacy, Narry - Freeform, i don't even know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 19:31:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7545178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amillionmistakes/pseuds/amillionmistakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry is tired.</p><p>Tired of waiting.  Tired of endless applications.  Tired of mountains of paperwork.  Tired of background checks and home studies and meetings with social workers that leave his nails bitten to the quick.  </p><p>Tired of young women who change their minds.  Tired of couples who decide they want their baby raised by people more ‘normal,’ who only entertain them as an option to take advantage of their status.  Tired of trips to the hospital that have them coming home empty-handed.</p><p>But most of all, Harry is tired of standing in the doorway of the second bedroom on the left.  Tired of watching his husband of five years settle into a rocking chair in front of an empty cot.  Tired of feeling like an utter failure for being unable to put a healthy, rosy-cheeked little one into his husband’s arms.  </p><p>They’ve been at it for four years now, and Harry is just…tired.</p><p>----</p><p>(An adoption!AU that no one asked for.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Those Who Wait

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, I've read one too many fics and drabbles where Niall dumps Harry for whoever he's rumored to be with at the time, and it drove me dip back into the world of fic writing. 
> 
> Disclaimer: My knowledge on overseas adoption comes from personal experience, light research, and what I've learned as a nurse, and even that I have bent to suit my whims. Inaccuracies should be expected. 
> 
> Inspirational credit to a tumblr prompt I've searched for, but cannot find, and to the great Ryan Reynolds, for the seriously fantastic quote about using Blake Lively as a shield to protect their baby. 
> 
> I just needed some Narry happiness, ya'll. This is trash, really.

Harry is tired.

Tired of waiting.  Tired of endless applications.  Tired of mountains of paperwork.  Tired of background checks and home studies and meetings with social workers that leave his nails bitten to the quick. 

Tired of young women who change their minds.  Tired of couples who decide they want their baby raised by people more ‘normal,’ who only entertain them as an option to take advantage of their status.  Tired of trips to the hospital that have them coming home empty-handed.

But most of all, Harry is tired of standing in the doorway of the second bedroom on the left.  Tired of watching his husband of five years settle into a rocking chair in front of an empty cot.  Tired of feeling like an utter failure for being unable to put a healthy, rosy-cheeked little one into his husband’s arms.     

They’ve been at it for four years now, and Harry is just…tired.

Days like today never get any easier.  After the first adoption had fallen through, Harry had thought—foolishly, perhaps—that another rejection would be easier to handle.  He should have known better.  Even as a teenager, before being put under the microscope of One Direction and all that celebrity entailed, the sting of being turned down always lingered longer than it should have, settling in the far recesses of his psyche and reminding him that he wasn’t yet good enough.  What he _has_ gotten better at is compartmentalizing.  Schooling his features, squaring his shoulders, taking each ‘no’ like a bullet to Kevlar—locking what he feels into the tiniest box he can find and shoving it onto a darkened shelf to be dealt with later, be it in the shower or in the middle of his morning run through Regent’s Park.

For now, his left arm extends over the console of the Rover, fingers entangled with Niall’s calloused, slightly shorter ones, his right hand white-knuckling the steering wheel. 

“He wasn’t meant to be ours,” he rumbles softly, trying to maintain the integrity of the bubble of silence the two have been in since they left the car park of St. Mary’s Hospital.  It’s a phrase he has said before, with the occasional changed pronoun, and has become a bit of a mantra—something he repeats in his head to keep himself moving on to the next agency, the next possibility.

Niall’s response is a long, hard squeeze of his right hand, wrist relaxing enough after to allow his thumb to glide over the platinum band of the Clauddaugh resting on Harry’s ring finger.  The silence stretches the whole way home, Niall’s temple resting against the window, eyes closed to the dreary day beyond it.  Harry puts the SUV in park and kills the engine, gaze steadfastly avoiding the rear-view mirror, which he knows reflects the navy car seat buckled in the back.  He lets his head fall back against the headrest, a slow exhale escaping his pursed lips.  Niall is already unbuckling his belt and opening the passenger side door, closing it behind him with a soft thud and pulling his keys from his jacket pocket.  Harry watches the front door shut behind him before leaning his forehead against the steering wheel and letting his mind go blank. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits like this—minutes?  Hours?—before he comes to enough to follow Niall inside, only knows that it’s considerably darker outside than when they’d first pulled up.

The house is quiet, cozy for all its largeness.  A five-bedroom Georgian that they had lovingly made into a home.  Harry had been skeptical at first.  He’d had his eye on a penthouse apartment on St. James’ Street that they’d looked at the day before this property viewing, and he’d already had big ideas involving him and Niall and the steam shower in the en suite.  But Niall had been insistent that they follow up on the last couple of viewings their real estate agent had lined up for them.  After two quickly-shot-down properties in Primrose Hill, Harry was mentally mapping out exactly how he could route his morning jog from the penthouse to Hyde Park when the realtor spoke up from the front seat,

 _“There_ is _one more I’d like to show the two of you.  A bit different from what you’ve been looking for, but it hasn’t been listed yet. You’ll be getting the first crack at it.  Would you like to see?”_

_“Haz?”  Niall’s eyes flick up to meet Harry’s in the rearview mirror.  Harry shrugs his shoulders,_

_“Fine by me.”_

_He’s tapping away on his phone—damned Apple Maps refusing to cooperate—when they pull into the drive at Hamilton Terrace, so he nearly misses Niall’s face when he takes in the feel of the property.  Nearly.  Harry’s just taken off his seatbelt and locked his mobile when he catches sight of Niall’s expression through the passenger-side window.  The blonde has his bottom lip tucked between his teeth as he gazes up at the gray brick façade a few seconds too long for simple curiosity, and Harry starts to see his steam shower fantasies slowly evaporate._

_“Just over fifty-two-hundred square feet of completely restored Georgian architecture,”  the agent explains, twisting the key in the lock of the large front door, “It’s got five bedrooms, six baths.  Quite a sizable back garden.  The previous owners put a lot of work into the lower ground floor.  Put in a bar, gym, cinema room, and billiard room—all open concept, all furnished.  There’s a guest suite on the ground floor as well, but all the other bedrooms are upstairs.”_

_The foyer opens into a moderately-sized staircase.  Natural light bathes the hardwood floors in golden yellow, and Harry hangs back as the realtor leads Niall up the staircase to look at the master suite, babbling on about skylights and garden tubs._

_This was_ not _what he had in mind in the slightest._

 _He can’t deny that the place is beautiful, but there are no floor-to-ceiling windows, no panoramic views of the city.  He’d envisioned his and Niall’s first place together as something like a posh bachelor pad; a penthouse in the clouds so high up that even the biggest telephoto lens couldn’t spot them.  This was a far cry from the frivolity of an uptown loft.  This was a_ house _.  Houses were_ investments _._ Adults _bought houses.  Adults worried about square-footage and bedroom-to-bathroom ratios and the size of the back garden, and Harry feels his chest tighten up.  He forces himself to take slow, deep breaths, wandering mindlessly through the lower floor.  For all the time that he’s been treated like an adult, he’s certainly never felt like one.  Not a proper one, anyway.  Sure, he’s bought homes all over the world, but he’s never_ lived _in one.  He’s never quite grown out of buying property, only to bury it in renovations and then find himself crashing in the spare at Nick’s or Ben and Meri’s or Cal’s, not wanting to leave after it’s complete.  Because those shiny new places were always too big, too lonely.  He still feels very much like a child in that sense, regardless of his twenty-six years._

_Then again, children don’t hide tiny black velvet boxes in the deepest pocket of their St. Laurent carry-on while they wait for the ‘right time’ to come along, do they?_

_Harry comes to a stop in front of a giant bay window in what he presumes is the study.  It overlooks the back garden and a spacious patio, all draped in gold from the soon-to-be-setting sun.  He can hear the clacking of heels against hardwood somewhere down the hall, so he startles when Niall’s left hand comes to rest on his lower back, knuckles gliding up his spine before stopping to circle between his shoulder blades._

_“You alright?”  Niall’s voice is light, but Harry can spot the furrow between his brows that belies his concern._

_“I’m good.”_

_Niall nods in reply.  He can tell Niall wants to ask for his opinion, but instead, the Irishman chooses to mirror Harry’s stance and follow his gaze out the window._

_Harry sighs audibly and bumps his hip against Niall’s,_

_“So…how much do you love it?”_

_To anyone else, it would seem that Niall has a non-reaction to the question.  But Harry has known him for a decade, has spent countless nights across the stage from him and countless mornings committing every freckle and scar and line and curve of his face to memory, so he catches the minute up-twitch of his lips before he schools his expression.  That’s all he needs to see to know that Niall’s eyes are seeing something completely different from his own—an image of what the place would look like with boots in the foyer and pictures lining the walls of the staircase and a California King under the skylight of the master suite.  And when his eyes flick back to what’s beyond the window, he can see it too—Niall’s grill tucked into the nook of the back patio, their friends and family scattered around the cedar picnic table close-by,_

_“Niall.  What  on Earth are we going to do with all this space?”_

_If he’s going to make a case for the Penthouse in the Clouds, now is the time.  He’s willing to bet this place doesn’t have a steam shower._

_“Has a feckin’ huge tub in the master.  With a fireplace.”_

_And it’s creepy, sometimes, how well Niall knows him.  A mindreader, sometimes, really.  Harry spends a quiet few seconds testing Niall’s telepathic capabilities—NIALL,  IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, CLAP YOUR HANDS—as he usually does in similar situations, to no avail._

_“As for the space,”  the blonde continues, smiling softly, eyes still cast out the window, and Harry knows he’s lost.  He can formulate some equally exciting plans for a Jacuzzi tub by a fire, he supposes,_

_“I guess we’ll just have to fill it.”_

That was nearly six years and two failed surrogacies ago.

Harry does his best not to dwell on those, has spent three years trying not to see it as a sign that maybe it’s possible to be _too_ blessed.  Like you’re only allotted so much in a lifetime, and between the career and the lifestyle and _Niall_ , he’s out of wishes, and asking for even more happiness is like plucking coins from a fountain.

He breathes the tension out of his shoulders as he slides off his coat and sets his boots next to Niall’s against the wall.  He goes on autopilot:  Keys on the hook.  Wallet in the bowl on the kitchen counter.  Socked feet on the stairs. 

He notes the open door on the left, disregards it, because he knows what he’ll see, and he just can’t right now.  He’s too tired.  So he passes it without turning his head, hand already reaching between his shoulder blades to pull his white t-shirt up over his head.  He toes out of his socks the second his feet hit the carpet of the master bedroom.  His black skinnies and boxer briefs follow a second later, and he tugs his hair from the neat bun he’d wrestled it into before collapsing into their unmade bed.  He envelopes himself in white down and Egyptian cotton and the scent of Niall’s aftershave and his own body wash.  He breathes in the comfort of it and wills the day to seep out of his lungs with every exhale.

He’s almost asleep when he hears the barely-there sound of Niall stripping down before sliding in behind him, fitting his chest to the curve of Harry’s back and nuzzling his nose into the crook of his neck, and with that, the last of the tightness is leeched from Harry’s muscles.  He reaches behind him, blindly patting Niall’s naked thigh until their hands are once again intertwined.  Harry uses the last of his alertness to brush his lips across his husband’s knuckles before tucking the hand around his waist and slipping into sleep.

 

*****

 

“UNCLE NI!”

Harry looks on as his husband is engulfed by what can only be described as a younger version of himself.  At thirteen, Theo stands nearly eye to eye with Niall, but their similarity in size does nothing to deter him from wrapping himself around his uncle like a koala bear, their combined laughter ringing out across Greg and Denise’s back garden.

It’s been just over four months since that heartbreaking day at St. Mary’s.  It’s also the longest they’ve gone without a call from an agency since they started their foray into the world of adoption.  So when Denise had rung them up to see if they were free for a Birthday Week Extravaganza in honor of Theo and Bobby, he grasped at it like a lifeline, clearing out the entirety of his and Niall’s schedules from mid-July until the middle of August and calling ahead to open their townhouse in Dublin.  Niall had come in from a pub night with the LIC to find Harry booking flights and making security arrangements, and—upon Harry’s rushed and worried explanation—had been so grateful that he slid to his knobby knees and sucked Harry off right there against the refrigerator.  It was a good night all around. 

“Christ, Theo!  Lay off the man!  He’s got knees worse than your grandad!”

Harry can feel his smile stretch his cheeks tight at the sight of his father-in-law, who looks exactly the same as he did the day he met him, bar a few extra smile lines around his eyes and mouth and a barely-there stippling of silver through his brown hair.  He slips an arm around Harry’s waist, and Harry let’s his arm rest over Bobby’s shoulders as they watch Niall’s futile attempts to extricate himself from their nephew.  But Theo may as well be an octopus for all the success Niall is having, his hands scrambling for purchase on whatever piece of his uncle he can reach.

“Gerroff me, ye heathen!”

“UNCLE NIALL!  YOU CAN’T BE MEAN TO ME!  IT’S ME BIRTHDAY!”

Bobby’s sigh of contentment ruffles the curls that lay on Harry’s shoulder, and he looks down to meet a pair of cornflower blue eyes, not unlike his husband’s. 

“Good to have you boys home,” Bobby smiles up at him, bringing a weathered hand up to pat Harry’s cheek.  Harry feels himself beam back down at him.

“Wouldn’t miss this for the world.  Are you sure you’re turning sixty, Bobby?  Don’t look a day over thirty-five.”

Bobby’s chuckle vibrates into Harry’s chest as he’s pulled into one of his father-in-law’s signature bear hugs. 

“Knew I liked you best for a reason,” he replies, and Harry sinks into the embrace, nuzzling his grin into Bobby’s shoulder.  He smells like laundry detergent and Irish Spring soap and beer, and Harry’s arms tighten at the familiarity of it. 

“Hey, now!  Stop hogging my sexy brother-in-law!”

And suddenly, his arms are full of soft curves and blonde hair.  Denise’s hands cup his face and she smacks a sloppy kiss to each cheek, leaning back to get a good look at him.  He takes the same opportunity with her.  Her hair is pulled back into a messy bun at the top of her head, and her blue and white gingham sundress is soft and sun-warm against his fingertips.  It’s times like now that he forgets that she isn’t a Horan by blood.  She has that same incandescence about her that he’s always seen in Niall and Bobby, but that seemed to have skipped over Greg. 

“Mornin’, gorgeous,” she coos, settling her hands on his shoulders and giving them a firm squeeze.

“Good to see you, love,” he smirks back, playfully swatting at her backside and dramatically hauling her against him, “When are you going to leave that dastardly husband of yours and marry me instead?”

“EH!  NONE OF THAT NOW!”  Greg is manning the grill, shaking his tongs at the two of them, and Harry dips her low until her bun is brushing the tops of the grass and covers her face in quick little pecking kisses in retaliation.  Greg just shakes his head at their antics and goes back to flipping his burgers.

“Slow down there, Casanova,” Niall pants, holding onto a struggling Theo by his ankles as the boy pounds at his back from where he’s slung over Niall’s shoulder.  He dimples down at Denise, “What say we make a trade?  I’ll let go of yours if you let go of mine.”

Harry stands Denise back upright, and she pats his bicep in thanks.

“If we must…” she smiles, and Niall drops Theo unceremoniously onto the ground, who scrambles to his feet and shoves Niall aside to wrap his arms around Harry’s waist for a quick ‘hello’ hug, then he’s off across the yard, where a group of his schoolmates are having a bit of a kick-about.  Denise hands them both a bottle of Stella from the cooler next to the grill and turns away to greet another newcomer.

Niall chuckles and leans heavily into Harry’s side, taking a long pull of his beer before turning to pull Willie into a hug.  And, for now, Harry thinks, everything is okay.

 

*****

 

It’s hours later, after Theo has opened a plethora of gifts ranging from new cleats to a Taylor Acoustic and the only guests lingering are family, when it finally gets brought up.  Harry isn’t even _technically_ there when it happens; he’s only passing through the kitchen to grab another rubbish bag from under the sink when he hears Theo’s voice from the living room, where he’s perched across from Niall on the couch, carefully stretching his fingers across the fretboard of his new guitar.

“Wanna learn it proper, Uncle Ni, so I can learn some lullabies for when the baby comes.”

Everything in Harry freezes up, breath hitching slightly in wait for Niall’s reaction.  They hadn’t discussed the next step, needed a bit of time to recuperate from the last ‘no’ before deciding where to go from here.  It’s Niall who keeps them going, who reminds Harry of why they have never stopped trying.  When their second surrogacy attempt ended in an unexpected miscarriage, it was Niall who first found the strength to look further and consider other options, dragging Harry out of a funk he doesn’t think he would have managed to escape alone.  So it’s no surprise that Harry’s insides seem to stall out when Niall comments nearly a full minute later, after a watery chuckle and a cough to clear his throat,   

“Startin’ ta think that’s not in the cards for us, bub.”

Harry aches.  It’s different, hearing his fears said out loud instead of inside his head.  He has always refused to verbalize his thoughts on the matter—too worried about the repercussions of speaking it into the universe for God or the Devil or whoever else to use as they will.  He leans back on the countertop, the edge of the formica digging into his lower back and keeping him tethered to reality.

“It’ll happen one day.  You ‘n Uncle Harry are gonna be too good at bein’ dads to just never get a baby.”

Harry’s eyes are watering at the certainty in his nephew’s voice.  He wants so badly to possess even a fraction of that sort of blind faith.  He inhales quietly through his nose, pursing his lips on the exhale.  Counts to ten.

“Plus,” Theo continues, fingers strumming a somewhat passable attempt at a B chord, “it may or may not’ve been my birthday wish.  But I can’t confirm or deny that, ‘cause then it might not come true.”

Silence.

“Wanna know a little secret, Uncle Ni?”

A light sniff, then,

“Sure, bub.”

Another B.  Softer, but definitely better than the last.

“My birthday wishes _always_ come true.”

And if Harry spends the next twenty minutes holed up in the bathroom trying to get his shit together, well…that can be his own little secret.

 

*****

 

Before dinner, the day is spectacularly unremarkable.  Bobby’s done up a roast and potatoes and invited them around for Sunday dinner, but it’s no different from any other Sunday since Harry and Niall have settled into their life-away-from-life in Dublin.  The respite from London has been the closest to a vacation that they’ve done in some time.  Harry writes here and there when the mood strikes, runs a 5km loop around their part of the city each morning, and is on page 214 of _To the Lighthouse_.  Niall’s days are filled by one of his multitude of little projects with the occasional crack-of-dawn tee time.  Sometimes they get called into Bressie’s studio so Niall can lay down a background guitar track, but that’s the most of it.  For now, they’re just coasting, and Harry’s beyond grateful for the opportunity to just _breathe._  

He’s in the midst of a heated debate with Greg over the last piece of rhubarb crumble, vehemently insisting that _no, Gregory, it does_ not _matter how large my first piece was_ , and Theo is sat between them, taking his self-appointed job as referee quite seriously, so he barely notices when Niall slips his phone from the pocket of his trekkies and excuses himself from the table.  Figures it’s Deo or Willie or Bressie or one of a million of Niall’s cousins or friends who want to invite him to the pub, or a show, or a round of golf, and continues the Rumble for the Crumble, clacking his fork against Greg’s in battle with Theo doing a fair impression of a sports announcer. 

“AHA!”  Harry proclaims roughly ten minutes later, his fork sinking into the gooey dessert after Greg apparently tires of the fight, “Quitters never win, Gregory, and winners never—“

“Niall?”

It’s the hesitation in Greg’s voice that stops his hand mid-slice.  Niall is standing in the doorway between the sitting room and the dining area, wide-eyed stare directed down to the screen of his iPhone, where it’s clutched tightly in his left palm.  His mouth is pulled into a tight line, the muscle along his jaw clenched taut, and all Harry’s senses go on red alert.  He sets his fork down softly, the light clink resounding in the room, which has fallen miraculously silent.

“Niall,” he tests, voice pitched low and held as steady as he can manage, doing his best to project every ounce of calm he can into three words, “What’s happened?”

Niall is still for a moment, his thumb glancing across the glass of his mobile before clearing his throat loudly.  His words are slow and somewhat hesitant,

“Ah…that was—uh, that was the Irish Agency.  There’s a closed adoption at Rotunda Hospital.  A girl, born a few hours ago.  The papers are already signed.”

Niall raises his eyes to meet Harry’s.

Time stops.

“She’s ours if we want her.”

Harry loses five seconds.  He’s not sure how he is frozen in his chair in one, and across the room the next, his arms full of his husband, who is collapsed against his chest, tears soaking into the well-worn fabric of his favorite Stones t-shirt.  Niall’s choking sobs are drowned in the background of the laughing and whooping and clapping of everyone else in the room—definitely can’t be heard over the ruckus Theo is stirring up from where he is all but dancing on the dinner table crowing _WHAT DID I TELL YOU, UNCLE NI?!_ at the top of his lungs.

Harry is almost afraid to believe it, but there on the dim screen of Niall’s mobile is the name and floor of the hospital nursery and a text confirming the release of parental rights from the birth mother.  Niall has pulled out of Harry’s arms and is scrubbing at his face, muttering to himself.  It takes Denise shoving his coat into his hands for him to realize Niall has slowly been working himself into a semi-hysterical frenzy.

“—NOTHING!  Not even a sock!  Haz, we don’t even have a CARSEAT TO BRING HER HOME IN.”

Harry’s hands dart up to Niall’s face and encircle his wrists, pulling them away from his hair and nudging his forehead against the blonde’s. 

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Niall breathes.

Harry leans forward, brushes their noses together and let’s his smile bleed across his face. 

“Let’s go get our girl.”

 

*****

 

Harry knows a lot of things about himself. 

He knows that he talks more slowly than the average person.  He knows that he’s coordinated enough to contort himself into a Half Lotus Crow, but _not_ coordinated enough to walk across a flat stretch of sidewalk without tripping over his own feet.  He knows that he has a 3-tequila-shot limit before he starts trying to strip off in the bar, and he knows that the most mind-boggling moment of his life is a neck-and-neck tie between Niall choosing _him_ when he could have had Selena or Barbara or _Celine_ and the day he found out that female kangaroos have three vaginas.  He still has issues wrapping his mind around both of those.

They’ve been lead to a private room at Rotunda, where they spent nearly two hours signing paperwork and going over a laundry list of details with the adoption agent and a couple nurses.  They’re left alone after all the Ts have been crossed with two New Parent diaper bags of goodies and a chorus of “Congratulations”—Harry leaning against the window, arms crossed and hands buried tightly into his elbows.  Niall is on the edge of the rocking chair in the corner of the room, head down, elbows on his knees.

There’s a soft knock on the door.  Niall startles into standing, and Harry straightens up.  He feels as if he’s standing on a trap door, just waiting for the floor to drop out from under him.  A nurse in navy scrubs shuffles into the room wheeling an open hospital carriage alongside her.  Through the transparent side, he can just make out a white bundle of blankets and the crown of a pale yellow hat peaking from the top.

“Hello, loves,” she greets them, her eyes crinkling in a smile, “Got someone here I reckon the two of you’d like ta meet.”

Harry had expected Niall to take point on this, but one glance his way tells him otherwise.  Niall is frozen, transfixed on the door, eyes wide and lips parted slightly.  Harry’s not all that sure he’s breathing, to be honest.  It’s enough to pull him across the room in his place.  He’s suddenly very aware of his own breathing, of his heartbeat pounding a steady rhythm against his ribcage, strong enough that he feels as if his whole body is throbbing with it.  He can’t actually feel his feet touching the floor.  He only watches the way that the nurse—Michele, her nametag says—leans over the crib to scoop the bundle into her arms.  The movement jostles the infant inside, and a resounding wail echoes against the walls.

“Hey now, none ‘o that, Little Dove,” Michele coos, bouncing lightly as she turns around.  The sound quiets considerably in the time it takes Harry to close the distance between the two of them.  He’s about a meter from being toe-to-toe with the nurse when she tilts her chin up to meet his eyes, her crinkly smile returning.

“This one has quite the set of lungs on her.  Think she’s gonna fit right in with her parents.” 

She lets her gaze fall back down to her arms, and Harry’s follows to light on porcelain-pale skin and a dusting of sandy brown hair peeking out from under a tiny newborn beanie, and it seems someone has gone and pulled the cord on that trap door he’s been standing on.  He raises a surprisingly steady finger up to brush against the feather of tiny eyelashes, and it startles her into opening her eyes, deep dark blue flashing up at him for a few breaths before slipping shut again.

“Would you like to hold her, Dad?”

_Dad._

He’s somebody’s _dad_.

The title is so long-awaited, sounds so unbelievable to his own ears, that it forces a sharp chuckle from between his lips.

“Very much,” he croaks, and he wonders when his throat started to clog up.

“If you could just…”  Michele jerks her head down a bit, and he crouches down in response to match her height so she can transfer the bundle into the crook of his right arm.  There’s a bit of whimpering and repositioning involved, but with a bit of adjustment, he has a head no larger than a small grapefruit tucked against his elbow, and _Jesus Christ, she’s so small_.  His palm seems to span the entirety of her back.  He’s in awe.

The second he has her in his arms, he knows exactly why nothing else has worked out for he and Niall.  Because _this_ is their daughter.  He knows it like he knows his own name or that the grass is green, feels it all the way to his bones.  He knows in an instant he’s never been more in love with any single thing or person in his entire life.  Knows Niall may be his soulmate, knows that he would go to war for Niall in a heartbeat, but he would use Niall as a human shield without a second thought to protect this baby.

Michele is a saint, really.  She reads the room like a well-worn novel, whispers a quick, “I’ll leave you to get acquainted,” and bows out, closing the door quietly behind her.

Niall hasn’t moved an inch from his previous position, though he does look as though he’ll collapse at any moment.  Harry approaches him slowly, lifting a hand to Niall’s shoulder and guiding him to sit down.  He seems to be in a bit of a daze, takes him a couple seconds to realize he’s no longer standing up.  He looks up at Harry with the same wide-eyed stare as before. 

“Are you ready?” he asks. 

Niall swallows, nods his head and lets out a shaky breath,

“Yeah…yeah, I’m ready.”

And not a single moment Harry can remember—not being put in One Direction or selling out Madison Square Garden or finally winning a Grammy after _six fucking albums_ or even his _wedding day_ —holds a single candle to the moment he leans down and settles her against Niall’s chest.  He’s wearing one of Harry’s old white t-shirts, the collar stretched low, and his arms cradle around her as she snuffles along his collarbone before resting against the warmth of his skin. 

“Hello, darlin’,” Niall chokes out.

Her eyes blink sleepily up at them for a bit, appraising them, then shutting again and drifting back to sleep as if saying, _you’ll do._

Niall’s face sort of crumples, and he tucks his cheek against her forehead, squeezing his eyes shut in an attempt to stem the flow of tears.  Harry just falls to his knees and tries in vain to keep his vision clear as he curls his palm around the top of her head.  He presses a feather-light kiss to her temple, then Niall’s, before resting his against his husband’s shoulder and letting his own tears soak into the worn cotton.

Finally.

_All good things to those who wait._

**Author's Note:**

> My first rambling entry into fic writing for this fandom.  
> Sorry you read all this.  
> Continue on with your daily lives.  
> Or...tumblr: amillionlittlemistakes


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